Valheim's Roadmap has a lot of players hyped for future content, but they're going to have to wait a bit longer — Iron Gate has effectively delayed the Hearth & Home update while it works on
Irongate first revealed Valheim's Roadmap right after release. It later talked about what content players could expect for the first major update "Hearth & Home" in more detail (as well as the rest of the expected content for 2021). Unfortunately, Iron Gate has made the decision to delay its progress on making new content for a short time — but it has a very good reason for doing so.
Why Valheim's Roadmap Has Been Delayed
Valheim's Roadmap was effectively delayed for one simple reason: the breakout popularity of the game.
As you've probably heard by now, Valheim is selling really well. More than 5 million copies have been sold in its first month alone, and that surprising success has also caused a shift in priorities for Irongate.
“We actually had to slow down the roadmap for the game,” Iron Gate's co-founder Henrik Törnqvist told Fanbyte. Neither he nor the rest of the team thought that the game would do as well as it had, and they've told Fanbyte that the rapid growth of the playerbase resulted in them making bugfixing a major priority for now.
We've already seen the fruits of that labor in the first few weeks. Multiple updates have launched, but none of these had any truly new content; instead, they've focused on closing exploits, fixing bugs, and tweaking the difficulty.
When is the Next Valheim Update?
Iron Gate has not provided a timetable for the next Valheim update just yet. That said, the delay in progress for Valheim's Roadmap may not be terribly long.
"I’m just looking forward to kind of seeing it through in the short term, which is definitely sort of getting to a point where we have squashed all the major bugs and can start talking about the first update and stuff like that," Valheim's Executive Producer Sebastian Badylak told Fanbyte.
For now, there's plenty of content in Valheim for new players to explore — you can get started with your Viking adventure by buying Valheim for PC in Steam Early Access at the price of $19.99 or your regional equivalent.
What do you think of Valheim's Roadmap development being slowed to fix bugs and balance the game? Do you think Iron Gate should be focusing on developing new content instead? Let us know in the comments below!